Internet Archive： Free and loanable digital libraries for text, movies, music, and Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, which is establishing a digital library to collect Internet websites and other cultural relics in digital form. Just like a paper library, we open these materials free of charge to researchers, historians, scholars, people with reading disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to enable everyone to access all knowledge.

We began to archive the Internet itself in 1996, when the Internet was just beginning to become a popular medium. Like newspapers, the content published online is also fleeting - but unlike newspapers, no one saves it. Nowadays, we can access over 28 years of network history through Wayback Machine, and we collaborate with over 1200 libraries and other partners through the Archive It program to identify important web pages.

As our online archive continues to expand, we are committed to providing digital versions of other published works. At present, our archive includes:

• 835 billion web pages

• 44 million books and texts

• 15 million recordings (including 255000 live concerts)

• 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million TV news programs)

• 4.8 million images

• 1 million software programs

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. We collaborate with thousands of partners worldwide to save copies of their works in special collections.

Because we are a library, we pay special attention to books. Not everyone has access to well stocked public or academic libraries, therefore, in order to provide universal access, we need to provide digital versions of books. We launched a book digitization program in 2005, and now we scan 4400 books every day in 20 locations worldwide. Books published before 1928 are available for download and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our open library website. One of the missions of the Internet Archive is to provide services for people who are difficult to interact with physical books, so most of our digital books can be used by people with reading disabilities (learn about access rights here).

Like the Internet, television is also a fleeting medium. We began archiving television programs at the end of 2000, and our first public television project was a television news archive centered around the events of September 11, 2001. In 2009, we began searching selected American television news broadcasts through subtitles in our television news archive. This service enables researchers and the public to use television as a reference material that can be cited and shared.

The Internet Archive provides services for millions of people every day and is one of the top 300 websites in the world. One copy of the books in the Internet Archive Library occupies 145+PB of server space (we have stored at least two copies of all contents). Our funding comes from donations, grants, and providing online archiving and book digitization services to our partners. Like most libraries, we value the privacy of customers, so we avoid retaining the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of readers, and use the https (security) protocol to provide our website.